cover of episode Yascha Mounk on the Identity Trap

Yascha Mounk on the Identity Trap

2024/4/10
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Yascha Mounk: 近几十年来,关于种族、性别和性取向的新观念兴起,改变了左翼对这些问题的思考方式,并日益影响主流机构。这些观念声称自己是打击不公正的最激进、最彻底的方式,但实际上排斥了其他争取更公正社会的传统方法,最终适得其反。它们导致进步机构难以运作,并激发了一些有害的教育实践,例如教导孩子将自己视为种族个体。最终反而帮助了全球极右翼民粹主义者,对民主制度构成严重威胁。同性恋权利运动和民权运动中,一些人主张融入现有普世价值观,而非彻底推翻,这与这些新观念相悖。 过度强调单一身份认同会妨碍人们获得社会认可和尊重,因为人们应该被认可为独特的个体,而非仅仅是某个群体的一员。虽然在面对压迫时,强调群体认同具有战略意义,但机构不应强加这种策略,而应允许个人自由选择。即使是像斯皮瓦克这样的左翼理论家也对“战略本质主义”概念的滥用表示担忧,因为这种概念在大学中被过度强调,剥夺了学生的选择权。 应该区分承认社会差异和追求平等对待。建立更公正的社会,目标应该是减少出身对个人机会的影响,而非依赖身份群体来决定人际互动和国家对待公民的方式。近几十年来,人们开始对文化领域的“不公正”进行严格审查,导致一些言论和表达方式受到限制。“文化挪用”的概念模糊且具有误导性,它掩盖了真正的不公正之处,即歧视而非文化交流本身。对文化元素的冒犯性取决于语境和意图,而非简单的“文化挪用”。相互的文化影响塑造了所有文化,它应该被庆祝,而非被视为需要避免的事情。 言论自由非常重要,其重要性不仅在于法律保护,还在于一种更广泛的文化氛围,允许人们在公共领域表达自己的观点。限制言论自由会巩固当权者的权力,削弱民主制度,并消除自我纠正机制。它会增加执政者通过暴力手段维持权力的动机。言论自由是一种重要的自我纠正机制,因为它允许人们对国家政策错误进行批评和抗议。虽然法律上允许言论自由,但实际上,许多言论可能会导致个人面临严重后果,从而限制了言论自由。为了保护言论自由,一些机构应该遵守类似美国第一修正案的规定,法律也应该限制私人公司对个人的权力。应该区分健康的批评文化和恐吓与取消文化的特征,例如次级抵制和集体惩罚。大学应该坚决捍卫学术自由,即使是那些观点具有冒犯性的演讲者,大学也应该允许其发言,但对暴力扰乱演讲的行为应进行处罚。即使观点具有冒犯性,也应该允许人们表达和辩护自己的观点。 Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds: 提问和引导讨论,促进Yascha Mounk对身份认同政治陷阱的阐述。

Deep Dive

Key Insights

What is the 'identity trap' according to Yascha Mounk?

The 'identity trap' refers to a set of ideas about race, gender, and sexual orientation that have transformed how the left thinks about these issues. While these ideas claim to be radical and consistent in fighting injustices, they reject other traditions of fighting for a just society, such as those that inspired the civil rights and gay rights movements. Mounk argues that these ideas are counterproductive, making it harder for progressive institutions to function and inadvertently aiding far-right populists.

Why does Yascha Mounk believe the identity trap is counterproductive?

Mounk believes the identity trap is counterproductive because it prioritizes ethnic and descriptive identities over others, encouraging practices like teaching children to conceive of themselves primarily as racial beings. This approach fosters division rather than unity, making it more likely to encourage racism and white supremacy rather than anti-racism. Additionally, it undermines the universalist principles that have historically driven successful social justice movements.

What examples does Yascha Mounk give of traditions rejected by those who fall into the identity trap?

Mounk cites two examples: the fight for same-sex marriage, where activists had to argue against members of the gay rights movement who rejected marriage as a bourgeois institution, and the civil rights movement, where figures like Frederick Douglass advocated for inclusion in universal values rather than rejecting them. Both examples highlight the importance of universalist principles in achieving social justice.

How does Yascha Mounk view the prioritization of ethnic identities in education?

Mounk criticizes the prioritization of ethnic identities in education, particularly practices like separating children into groups based on race in classrooms. He argues that this approach is a political and personal trap, as it encourages division and fosters racism rather than anti-racism. It also forces individuals to privilege one identity over others, limiting their ability to be recognized for their unique qualities and achievements.

What is Yascha Mounk's stance on cultural appropriation?

Mounk argues that the concept of cultural appropriation is imprecise and misleading. While there are cases where one group's cultural influence over another is associated with injustice, the term often mislabels mutual cultural influences as inherently problematic. He emphasizes that the focus should be on addressing specific injustices, such as discrimination, rather than broadly condemning cultural exchange, which has historically enriched societies.

How does Yascha Mounk defend the importance of free speech?

Mounk defends free speech by highlighting its role as a self-correcting mechanism in society. He argues that restricting free speech entrenches the power of the powerful, increases the incentive for political violence, and removes a key tool for addressing societal mistakes. He also emphasizes the need for a culture of free speech, where individuals can express their views without fear of social or professional repercussions.

What does Yascha Mounk say about no-platforming speakers in universities?

Mounk believes universities must robustly defend academic freedom, as their core mission is to pursue truth through the exchange of ideas. While he doesn't endorse inviting controversial speakers, he argues that once a speaker is invited, universities must ensure they can speak. He also suggests that university leaders should clearly uphold free speech and discipline students who violently disrupt events, while supporting peaceful protests against offensive views.

Shownotes Transcript

Translations:
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This is Philosophy Bites with me, Nigel Warburton. And me, David Edmonds. Philosophy Bites is entirely unfunded. Please help us keep it going by subscribing or donating at www.philosophybites.com. We all have various identities, ethnic, class, religious, identities based on our passions or values, upbringing and much else besides. These identities frame our lives. They provide them with meaning,

But according to Yashamunk, what should be a healthy relationship with particular identities has become an obsession, a sickness. Yashamunk, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you so much. The topic we're going to talk about is the identity trap. What is the identity trap?

Well, I think over the last decades, we've had the rise of a new set of ideas about race and gender and sexual orientation that have really transformed how the left thinks about those issues and had increasing influence in mainstream institutions as well.

This trap has a lure, which is to say that it is a set of ideas which claims that they are the most radical, the most consistent in fighting against injustices that are all too real, against forms of discrimination that clearly still characterize our societies. But they actually reject other traditions.

of how to fight for a more just society, including those that have inspired the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement for a long time. And as a result, I think that they are a trap. They end up being counterproductive. And we have seen in the last years how the norms inspired by these ideas have made it harder for progressive institutions to function and serve their important missions, have inspired pedagogical movements

practices that teach children to conceive of themselves as racial beings, to see the most important thing about themselves as being the particular group into which we're born. And I even think that it's a political trap because it ultimately helps rather than harms the far-right populists around the world who remain a very serious danger to our democratic institutions. Just before we get into identity a bit deeper,

Could you give an example of a kind of tradition that's been rejected by people who you think have fallen for the identity trap? Yeah, I can give you two examples. One is that when you speak to people like my friend Jonathan Rauch, who were really the first to argue for same-sex marriage, about whom we would not have same-sex marriage today.

they always emphasize that the first fight they had to win was within the gay rights movement against members of the movement who said marriage is a terrible bourgeois institution, we want no part of it, burn all of that down. And they said no, our society today is deeply unjust because it claims to have these universal values and it doesn't respect us. But what we want is inclusion in these universal values, not to reject them and burn them down. The other example would come from the civil rights movement and the earlier abolitionist movements

in the United States. Somebody like Frederick Douglass recognized the hypocrisy of his fellow citizens when they invited him to hold a speech commemorating the Fourth of July, saying, how can you talk about all men being born equal when my brethren are held in chains? But he did not say, rip up the Constitution. He said, if you mean those values seriously, you should allow us to be protected by them as well when it comes to free speech.

He recognised that newspapers in the American South were publishing openly terrible racist things in his day. But he defended free speech, calling it the dread of tyrants, because he realised it's also what allows members of oppressed minorities to make their case and fight back against those injustices. Let's turn to identity then, because that's a complex notion. Most of us identify as

with multiple groups, you know, I'm red-haired, I'm left-handed, I'm white, I'm English, I'm a podcaster. There are all kinds of identities that I have. I don't think I'm just one thing. How do you get to the state where people get focused on just one element of their identity?

Yeah, it's interesting when we used the term identity 50 years ago, we didn't actually think about the particular groups into which we're born. We thought of it in a more literal sense. My identity as opposed to your identity. I'm a different person from you, right? And this idea of social identity has come to be dominant

over the last decades. I think, by the way, that parts of that are perfectly fine and healthy. Of course, we're recording this in London, in a deeply diverse city like London. Many people are going to speak different kinds of languages at home, are going to be proud of their cultural heritage, perhaps even of the ethnic group to which they belong. And that is perfectly fine, as long as they also see the commonalities they have with other citizens, as long as that identity is compatible with other identities

as Londoners or as Britons, as people who have certain political commitments and so on, right? I think what's striking at the moment is the triumph of a set of practices that encourage and teach people to prioritize those ethnic and other descriptive identities over others. So in the United States, for example, you have a very influential educational consultancy called Embrace Race.

that tells the most influential elite private schools in the country that the task of a progressive education should be to teach students to conceive of themselves as racial beings. And so you have teachers coming into classrooms in the third grade and the second grade and the first grade and telling children, if you're black, you go over there, and if you're Latino, you go over there. If you're Asian American, you go to that classroom. If you're white, you go to that classroom. I'm

I think that this is a political trap and a personal trap. It's a political trap because everything in social science and history suggests and teaches us that how we identify is quite flexible. We can identify in many different ways and with many different identities at the same time. But once I say you're part of my group and that guy over there is not part of my group, I'm very likely to favor you, to treat you better than the other, and sometimes to treat the other in terrible ways. So I think that these practices...

are more likely to encourage the rise of racists than of anti-racists, of white supremacists, rather than of people who fight back against white privilege. But at the personal level, I think this is a trap because it precisely teaches us to privilege one identity over the other.

and forces us to conceive of ourselves in terms of that identity, whether we want to or not. I have a good friend whose father is African American and his mother is Puerto Rican, and he was forced on his first day of college to choose between his black or his Latino identity because he had to choose which room to go to. And he felt the vetted violence to his identity. More broadly, I worry that these practices won't allow us

to gain the kind of social recognition and respect that we all seek. To have that respect, of course I need to feel that my group has adequate standing in my society, that people aren't denigrating me, that they're not thinking of me as a social inferior. And there's still work to be done on that. But I don't think that I'm going to feel that recognition by being perceived in exactly the same way as my brother, who has a very similar, perhaps identical, intersection of identities to me,

But I want to be recognized for my own idiosyncrasies and tastes and achievements and perhaps failings, right? And so I think this sets people up for failure in how to pursue the kind of social recognition that understandably they wish and care for.

To put the other side, if I'm a member of an oppressed minority and society generally tends to see me as having that identity and victimises me because of that, surely there is some value in me focusing on that and somehow building up my shell, finding solidarity with other people who will protect me from that kind of attack.

And that insight, which I think is real, is the origin of this tradition, which comes from the thought of people like Gayatri Spivak saying, you know, in philosophical terms, the essentialist account of identity is wrong. But for strategic political purposes, we should act as though these group identities were natural, because that's what's going to allow people to fight back against injustice. And within limits, I think that that is true.

But when institutions impose that strategy on people, rather than letting them choose it themselves, I think they go too far. In a liberal society of freedom of association, people can of course choose to join a group that is organized around those lines.

for universities or high schools or middle schools or elementary schools to tell students that they must participate in groups like that is an imposition of identity from the outside that is very dangerous and it's telling that very

far-left progressive theorist like Spivak came to have deep concerns about the use that is being made of her concept for that very reason. She said that the idea of strategic essentialism just became the union ticket for a much more vulgar kind of essentialism. And she ended up mocking Spivak

She was born and raised in India, where there's T. Wallace selling chai in the streets. She ended up mocking the identity Wallace at American universities who make these essentialist notions of identity so central to the campus culture that this is not a choice students have.

Already in some of what you've said, you've espoused a kind of universalism. And in certain quarters, in academic circles, that is ridiculed. There is no universality of human beings. There are no common values. We have to recognise difference. So how can you possibly confront those people when you've got such a different premise as a starting point?

Well, the first point is that we have to distinguish between recognizing difference in society and aspiring to treat people in the same manner. So of course we must have our eyes wide open

to the forms of differential treatment that people have historically experienced and to some extent continue to experience today because of the race, the gender and the sexual orientation. To be race-blind in that sense would be absurd. But that doesn't settle the question as to how we build a better and a more just society.

Is that one in which how we interact with each other in this room and how the state treats all of us comes to explicitly depend on the kind of identity groups of which we're a part? Or is that one in which we aim to live up to our longstanding universal principles to such an extent that what group you're born into comes to have less importance in determining your life opportunities and in determining how we all interact with

with each other. I think it is the latter ideal that is much more appealing in terms of the kind of society that we could create and ironically it is also less naive because when you look back at the emancipation movement, at the civil rights movement, at the gay rights movement, at all of those movements that have brought tremendous progress for our societies,

That was always universalist movements of that sort, not ones that pretended that difference didn't exist, not ones that refused to organise along ethnic or religious lines when particular groups were experiencing injustices. All of that is fine, but ones that insisted on equal treatment. One of the distinctive features of the last few decades is the way in which people have started to police injustice.

the cultural world. So some things can't be said, some people can't say things other people can. There are prominent members of some minority groups who say you can't write a character in a novel from a perspective that you don't actually have. Or you can't have an actor representing a member of a minority group who isn't actually themselves from that group. What do you say about those sorts of cases? Yeah, so I think there are particular cases in which

one group taking inspiration from another is associated with an injustice. And we have started to label those cases by this term of so-called cultural appropriation.

But because the term is very imprecise and because I think it's actually misleading, it has made us put under a general pole of suspicion all kinds of mutual cultural influences between different groups. Let me give you a couple of examples here. White musicians in the 50s and 60s in the United States were inspired by the cultural creativity of black musicians. And many of them ended up having big careers.

That is rightly seen as an injustice because those black musicians were not able to reach a similarly wide audience. Now what is what philosophers call the wrong-making feature of? What is it that was unjust about the situation? Is it the existence of white jazz saxophonists? Or is it the fact that black musicians could not travel freely across the American South? That they were banned from many concert venues? That they wouldn't be played on many major radio stations because of the color of their skin?

Well, it is those latter injustices that we can name in a much starker way without invoking the term of cultural appropriation. And that's important because it points us to how to remedy the situation. Stopping white jazz musicians from playing their music would not have helped anything.

overcoming the explicit forms of racial discrimination that black musicians and other black people suffered would and did help make the country less unjust. You know, there's a really clear case on this that is a little strange involving a fraternity at Baylor University in Texas that held what they called a Cinco de Drinko party, a kind of pastiche of a Cinco de Mayo party which celebrates Mexican heritage.

And many of the students showed up to this party wearing ponchos or sombreros, maid's outfits and construction vests. Now, what's telling about this is that the concept of cultural appropriation can't actually express what was wrong with this.

Because according to that, the students who wore ponchos and sombreros were doing something offensive, but the students who wear construction vests or maid outfits were not. After all, a maid's outfit is not a part of Latino culture. It was not a form of cultural appropriation. And yet I think anybody reasonable looking at the situation

will conclude that perhaps both groups of students were offensive, but certainly the ones who wore maids' outfits were even more offensive because they were sending the message that the Latino fellow students should not have white-collar jobs, that the natural station of them in life should be to be manual workers, and so on. What was offensive here was not cultural appropriation. It was the intention to mock, to denigrate, to send that kind of signal of inferiority

And all of this matters from a perspective of universalism because mutual cultural influence has helped to create all of our cultures. It's evident in virtually every aspect of our arts and culture today, of our technology, of our writing system, of how we do mathematics. And in fact, those forms of mutual cultural influence are what make cities like London and New York great rather than what we should worry about in these societies.

Just to take that example of the sombreros, what is it that's considered offensive about wearing a sombrero?

Well, I think that really depends on the cultural context. And again, here, getting away from the concept of cultural appropriation makes that clear. You know, I had a student, when I debated cultural appropriation with my students, signing texts on both sides, tell me a story of their high school in Florida, in which they had a day of celebrating the cultures of students, something that I like.

And one of the teachers, who was an immigrant from Nigeria, encouraged his favorite students to wear some of his tribal clothing that he brought in for them. Some of these students were white, and the moment they came in, there was an uproar, and they were hauled in front of a principal and accused of cultural appropriation. The teacher tried to intercede on their behalf, but the principal said, no, you should have known that this is offensive. You're going to get detention even if you're invited to do so.

I think what this shows is that there's some amount of difference in the spirit in which you engage in a different culture. Certainly if you are invited to participate in it or if you do it as a form of honoring it, if you do it because it inspires you, because you think it allows you to create something beautiful, then that's something that we should celebrate. If you do it in a context where you're

you're aiming to mock or perhaps reasonably other people will see you as mocking that culture, then you should abstain from doing that because it's not very nice to go around mocking people. So I think the sombrero would depend on the context, depend on the intentions of a student and depend on how the student reasonably will expect others to read what he's doing.

It's probably not as simple as that though, is it? Because some people are offended by almost anything. Other people have very, very thick skins and you could mock them and they'll actually laugh.

So how do you know in advance how your gesture is going to be received? How do you set limits on what is acceptable and what is considered objectively offensive, not just offensive to somebody who's trigger happy? Well, let me say two things about that. I mean, the first is that obviously the fact that somebody may be offended is never a reason for legal limits on what you can do. And that goes back to the very origins of the free speech tradition, in part because otherwise you are creating an incentive

for false claims of being offended, right? If a way to stop a form of speech or a form of cultural expression is to emphasize how offended you are by it, then anybody who wants to stop you from saying what you're saying will pretend to be super offended. And that's not a very healthy set of social incentives.

I certainly don't think that you need to be regulated by the most offended person in the room. And I certainly don't think that either institutions or laws should put a stop to those kinds of supposedly offensive forms of cultural expression. But for myself, I will think, will reasonable people be offended by what I do? Will they reasonably think that I'm mocking them, reasonably think that I'm trying to denigrate them? And if that is the case, that is a very strong pro-Tanto reason.

against saying those things, against engaging in those actions. There may never be a reason to do that. Sometimes it's appropriate to mock people because they hold deeply politically damaging beliefs or they are engaged in some form of very bad social activity. But certainly when I think that my actions will reasonably be seen as mocking people, that creates a reason in itself to say, all right, let me be a little bit careful here. Do I want to do that?

If we take the issue of how trans people are treated in society, there are some groups of trans people who will say even to discuss the notion of trans as a non-trans person is doing violence to their identity. Particularly if you call into question the idea that people can self-determine their genders.

Well, I think here there is an important political issue at stake, which is questions like who should be allowed to participate in sports directed to protected categories like women, or how we should deal with spaces in which women might be vulnerable, like prisons or women's shelters.

And so while I understand that some people might be understandably upset by those discussions, there are important societal issues at stake. And so therefore we have to think through this and we have to be able to debate those questions. It is important to distinguish between denying somebody's right to exist and

and having a different set of views about what follows from their identity. The attempt by activists to pretend that somebody having different views about whether or not trans women who have gone through male puberty should be allowed to participate in a rugby competition somehow denies the right to exist in the world is simply a confusion of words and sometimes I think a deliberate confusion of words.

Am I right that you're espousing something like the traditional liberal view of free expression and its importance here? I am a liberal and I believe in free speech. I believe in the importance not just of laws governing free speech, which are particularly important in a place like the United Kingdom, where those rights have now been significantly restricted, but also of a broader culture of free speech in which people are actually able to speak their minds in the public sphere, something that we know from many surveys

is not now the case for most people in the United States, for most students at British and American universities, and so on. I think, however, that I have a different set of reasons for why free speech is so important from that that has historically dominated the liberal traditions.

So when you read John Stuart Mill's Wonderful on Liberty, Chapter 2, most of the arguments for free speech are about the good things that you get from having free speech. The fact that we may preserve the truth to fight for another day. He never was naive about marketplace of ideas, but he said that at least free speech will make sure that good ideas don't get completely lost, that another generation might rediscover them.

He talks about the importance of holding views as living truths rather than as their dogma. I think all of that is right. But the most important arguments for free speech and the arguments for free speech that are going to have more pull in a highly politically polarized moment are about the bad things that happen when you don't have free speech.

So what are those bad things that are going to happen when free speech is taken away? I think there's three sets of bad things. The first is about political power. One of the things that always strikes me as strange among my friends and colleagues who, like me, are rooted in the political left, is this idea that at the moment when there's very dangerous far-right extremists and populists gaining a lot of political power around the world, restrictions on free speech will somehow miraculously serve the great good of social justice.

That might be likely when you're discussing speech codes at Smith College or at Harvard University, but it's not going to be the case at the level of society as a whole. You know, the government speech office census or the members of some Silicon Valley company's speech facilitation committee, or whatever they might call it, are

are by definition going to be powerful, affluent, influential people. They're not going to be on the side of the marginalized. So one danger is simply that you entrench the power of the powerful to perpetuate injustices against minority groups. The second bad consequence is political. One key element of our democratic, of our political settlement

is that when you lose an election, you can go home, which is hard to do, which is painful, but you know you can continue to make your case. You know you can try and persuade your fellow citizens to change their minds about you, and then you can come back into power in four or five years. And that is what makes it bearable to step down from office, a political norm that we know from January 6, 2020 can hardly be taken for granted in this day and age.

When office holders reasonably fear that losing power will also lose them their platform, will get them banned from social media and make it harder for them to make their case, that increases the incentive to stay in power by violent means if necessary. And then third, I think that free speech is a kind of master value. You might say, look,

curtailing free speech has really negative consequences, but so do other policy mistakes. If you fail to approve a cancer drug that could save many people, their lives are in the line. So why do we have special protections for speech, but not against the state banning medical drugs? And one key reason for that is that when the state makes those mistakes in all kinds of other policy areas, we have the right to speak out about it and to agitate about it.

So that is a key self-correcting mechanism. When you curtail free speech, you lose that key self-correcting mechanism. It's one thing to have a right to free speech, but de facto, many things which are legally permissible would get people into so much trouble, might result in them losing their job.

being harassed online and off, that practically free speech is being curtailed by groups who don't really believe in free speech.

Yes, and here we need to argue not just for the ultimate protection against the state jailing you for saying something that it dislikes. Right, you no longer can take for granted. The police in Merseyside in the United Kingdom during the pandemic talked to the streets with a big banner saying being offensive is an offense.

that was not exactly a correct interpretation of the applicable law, but there have been many prosecutions of people, many of whom said things that I myself find to be dreadful, that have resulted in jail sentences in European countries. I think that that is a profound mistake. In that sense, I'm a good new American and I defend the First Amendment. But as you're pointing out,

And as people like John Stuart Mill always emphasized, in many ways the most profound social tyranny comes from society rather than from the state. So we need protections against that as well. And there's a few key ones. The first is that some institutions should bind themselves by free speech protections that are modeled on the American First Amendment. And that includes certainly universities and to some extent I think social media platforms.

The second is that we need policies and laws that curtail the power that private companies now hold over private individuals. I think that as long as you don't bring your politics into your workplace, companies should not be allowed to fire you for your political views, as they now freely can in many countries, including the United States.

I think that companies that perform essential services for people, such as banks, credit card companies, airlines, train operators, should no more be allowed to sever the business relations with you on the grounds of your political views than the companies supplying you with electricity or water or gas. And so we need laws that restrict companies

the ability of those private companies to punish customers for their political views. And then there's a question, which is, I think, generally difficult, about social consequences, where two liberal rights butt up against each other. Because I have a freedom of association, right? If you say something offensive, it's my good right to stop inviting you to dinner. And it's even my good right to say, if that guy over there is going to have dinner with you, I'm no longer going to have dinner with him either.

But I think here we need to self-police a little bit and recognize the distinctions between a healthy culture of robust criticism and the hallmarks of a culture of intimidation and cancellation. And some of those hallmarks of that culture of cancellation include secondary boycotts, that I don't just disassociate with you, but with anybody who continues to have friendly relations with you. It is these forms of

collective pylons where you have petitions to expel somebody from a professional association or to boycott a venue. It is rendering morally toxic anybody who defends somebody from accusations of having done something bad.

These are rules of thumb. They should not be enforced by policy. But they are things that all of us, when we're outraged by something, should remember as criteria for ourselves as to whether we are verging into the territory that undermines a genuine culture of free speech.

Pulling this back to identity politics specifically, one of the ways that plays out in universities particularly is in this idea that some people should be disinvited from speaking because they are offensive to particular identity groups. They should be no-platformed.

Where do you stand on that? On that, universities need to be very, very robust defenders of academic freedom, a particular form of free speech, because the core mission of universities is to pursue the truth and to have a robust exchange of ideas. I don't particularly like student groups who go out of their way to...

invite the most trollish people around. If I was president of a student association, I would probably choose not to invite most of those kinds of people.

But the university does not get to tell its members, its students, what kind of debates and what kind of speech to engage in. And so once a student group has invited a speaker, the university must maintain their ability to speak. What's always struck me as strange is that university presidents and vice chancellors

don't manage to send a clear message upholding free speech and if necessary dissociating themselves from the views of particular speakers. If I was a university president, a job I wouldn't want in a million years, I would make it very clear that students who violently disrupt a speech, who render it impossible for that speech to go forward, will face serious disciplinary punishment.

And at the same time, I would happily participate in any peaceful protest against an invited speaker with genuinely offensive views. Look, I'm very sympathetic with most of what you've said there, but there will be people listening to this who find your views offensive.

What do you say to them? Well, I look forward to hearing what arguments they make. I might find some of their views offensive, but I'm not going to try to stop them from being able to explain and advocate for their views. And I should hope that they extend the same courtesy to me. Yashamukh, thank you very much. Thank you so much. For more Philosophy Bites, go to www.philosophybites.com. You can also find details there of Philosophy Bites books and how to support us.